by ZaAndrei Zaharia

Created on: May 04, 2009

A motherboard is just something to connect your entire computer's hardware together? For more demanding people and gamers alike, it's not just that! To any computer builder, this should be the most important piece of a computer. It is the backbone of the computer. Yes, the processor is the brain, and the video card basically the optical thinker, but the motherboard can include most of these technologies. Most can come with an audio card, video card, north & south bridge chips (small processing cores), ROM (read only memory like RAM), voltage regulators (power supply) and others.

The P5Q-Pro motherboard from Asus is a P45 chipset motherboard. The only disadvantage of this motherboard is that it does not have integrated video. It has no video output, so you absolutely need an external graphics card. The idea behind this is the fact that people that are going to spend some decent money on a motherboard will also buy a graphics card, because internal graphics cannot even get close to the performance of external ones.

First of all let's start with the basics. It is an ATX form factor motherboard, bigger than the Baby ATX form factor; it is actually the biggest before server types. It supports anything from a single core process to the new Quad core processor (note that does not include the Core I7s). This type of socket is called LGA775. It supports Front Side Bus speeds up to 1600 mhz. AS for the RAM memory modules, it support dual-channel DDR2 ram up to 1200 MHz speeds for a capacity of up to 16 GB (4x 4 GB modules). It has 2 PCI-E x16 slots for graphics extension. When in crossfire mode, it does a x8 and x8 link (it doesn't not support Nvidia's SLI). It has 3 PCI-E x1 slots for other devices, as well as 2 standard PCI slots. All these slots mixed together are the perfect combination for the average gamer and the average computer user. For storage, it has 8 SATA II slots as well as 1 PATA (Parallel ATA) slot for older devices. Those devices are fully supported in Raid 0/1/5/10 Matrix Raid. In the back is had 6 USB slots, 7.1 surround sound audio, and the average stuff on the back (mouse and keyboard outputs and other things minus the video out).

This motherboard comes packed with overclocking features. It has a passively cooled South Bridge by a solid copper block. For the North Bridge we have A passively cooling solid copper block which is connected by copper piping to the voltage regulation area for the processor. Its BIOS is fully customizable for precise

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